11

Mildred looked up from a thick pile of Mideast intelligence summaries and watched as Huxstep ran the magnetic head back and forth over the felt that covered the conference table. His shirtsleeves were rolled up to his biceps, revealing part of a patriotic tattoo on each arm—”begun to fight” on his right arm, “Give me liberty or” on his left arm. Huxstep’s gestures were systematic. Mildred liked men who were systematic, who didn’t leave anything to chance. Out of the blue she asked him, “Is it true you can do funny things with numbers?”

Huxstep kept his eyes glued to the needle on the meter. “Test me out?”

Mildred pulled a pocket calculator from a purse that resembled a carpetbag and punched in some numbers. “Multiply 123456789 by 987654321,” she said.

“That’s a piece of cake,” Huxstep said. “The answer’s 121932631-112635269.”

Mildred glanced at her calculator. The window only accepted nine digits. She saw he had gotten the first nine numbers right. “What’s your trick?” she asked.

“I don’t got a trick,” Huxstep insisted. “I seen right off if you multiply 987654321 by 81 you get 80,000,000,001, then multiply 123456789 by 80,000,000,001, which is child’s play, and divide the answer by 81.” Huxstep started to laugh under his breath, but stopped abruptly when he spotted the needle vibrating. “I got a bite!” he called.

The Admiral and Wanamaker, working at Wanamaker’s desk, glanced across the room.

Huxstep pinpointed the spot with sweeps of the magnetic head, then gingerly lifted the cloth and felt around with his fingertips. “Fuck,” he muttered. He held up a deformed paper clip.

“Keep at it,” the Admiral ordered. He turned back to Wanamaker. “I traced the letter to the Company mail room, which is pretty much like tracing it to the Washington, D.C., central post office.”

Wanamaker grunted; he had hoped for more. “That’s a dead end, then.”

“Not quite a dead end,” Toothacher said. Wanamaker perked up, a smirk of anticipation pasted on his pudgy lips.

At the conference table, Mildred was still trying to strike up a conversation with Huxstep. “You are obviously a jack-of-all-trades.”

“I am a jackass-of-all-trades,” Huxstep corrected her, his eyes on the meter.

“How so?” Mildred asked.

“Well, I drive the Admiral around, don’t I? I take in, I take out, sandwiches, messages, burn bags. I organize things so the Admiral isn’t bored nights. Between chores I debug offices. But I don’t really enjoy my work. I do everything badly.”

Mildred lifted her veil suggestively. Her voice seemed to lap against the conference table as if it were a shore. “If something is worth doing, it may be worth doing badly. What do you enjoy? What do you do well?”

Huxstep surveyed the upper half of her face. Little lines fanned out from the corners of her eyes. Invisible eyebrows, plucked down to the bone, arched in curiosity. “Before I joined the Navy,” he said, “I worked in another circus—a real one. I did arithmetic tricks. People would shout out problems and I’d solve them in my head. Wednesdays I filled in for the fire breather—I’d swig kerosene and light a match and singe the eyebrows off the ones who looked at me the wrong way.”

Mildred, impressed, gushed, “You can breathe fire?”

Huxstep’s face screwed up into a crooked smile. “Aside from numbers, what I like, what I do well, is violence.”

Mildred’s tongue flickered at her upper lip. She snapped the veil back over her eyes. “Chacun à sa faiblesse,” she said in a tone husky with sensuality.

“I don’t speak nothing but English,” Huxstep muttered. “Even that the Admiral don’t think I speak good.”

Across the room the Admiral was telling Wanamaker, “Whoever composed these love letters works for the Company. How else could he—or she—have gotten access to the interoffice pouching system?”

Wanamaker shook his head in bewilderment. “Who? Who? Who? Who? Who?”

“Let’s come at the problem from another direction,” the Admiral suggested. “Let’s concentrate on motive. Why? Why? Why? Why? Why?”

“You have an idea?”

“It could be you who is sending these love letters.”

This took Wanamaker by surprise. His expression that was expressionless evaporated. “Me? Why would I do it?”

“You might be trying to create an excuse to cancel an operation that you have no confidence in, or stomach for, in a way that wouldn’t indicate to your handlers in the Company hierarchy any lack of nerve.”

“If I wanted to cancel, I’d cancel. Period. My reputation isn’t riding on this.”

“Or it could be any of your people—Mildred over there, or Parker, or Webb. One of them may have qualms, moral or operational in origin, and be trying to head off Stufftingle without looking like a left-leaning card-carrying fellow-traveling wimp.”

Wanamaker thought about this for a moment. Presently he said, “All three consider me a closet middle-of-the-roader. They are rabid. What we are doing doesn’t go far enough for them. So that’s not the answer.”

The Admiral tried another tack. “Whoever is sending you these love letters could just as well be sending them to the Company Director, or the White House, or The Washington Post, with little arrows pointing to Operations Subgroup Charlie, SIAWG. But he’s not doing that. He’s sending them to you.”

“Which means?”

“Which could mean he’s not at all sure what rods and hair triggers and wedges really mean and is just doing it to annoy you. Or he has an inkling and is trying to head you off without bringing the roof down on the Company.” The Admiral turned to stare at what sky he could see through the grime of the windows. “Or all of the above,” he said more to himself than to Wanamaker. “Or none of the above. Or any combination thereof.”

At the conference table Huxstep started packing the magnetic head and the meter into a black Plexiglas case. “If there’s a bug in this room,” he called across to Toothacher, “I’ll eat it.”

Parker, a sour-faced, sour-breathed man in his early forties, pranced into Wanamaker’s inner sanctum carrying the leather interoffice mail pouch. He pulled an envelope from it and dropped it onto the desk between Wanamaker and the Admiral. Printed on the outside of the envelope, in a child’s unsteady scrawl, was

R. Wanamaker

Operations Subgroup Charlie

Special Interagency Antiterrorist Working Group (SIAWG)

Mildred, who had come up behind Parker, stared down at the letter in horror. Wanamaker, expressionless, slit it open with a finger and, using a soiled handkerchief, extracted a sheet of computer printout paper. He flattened it on the desk. Inside a mushroom-shaped cloud, coming out of the mouth of someone with a broken nose, were the words Stufftingle and Ides of March.

“He knows the code name of our operation,” Wanamaker moaned.

“He knows the date too,” Parker noted.

“And there are no bugs, no microphones in the room,” Mildred said in total bafflement.

“None,” Huxstep called across from the conference table. “Not one.

“This is getting curiouser and curiouser,” the Admiral admitted.

“Curiouser and curiouser,” Huxstep muttered, loud enough for Toothacher to overhear. “And the Admiral accuses me of not speaking the King’s English!”